Mystery Dinner

I mentioned yesterday that Miss Mischief enjoyed her belated birthday party.  Indeed all the girls who came seemed to enjoy themselves.  Miss Mischief chose to have a Mystery Dinner this year and it went beautifully.  Lucky for me I will not have this requested for her friends again because now they know.  My feet are very happy!

The Mystery Dinner involves a menu of 20 or so items from which to choose.  You end up having all 20 items served to you over the course of the evening, but the menu is in 'code' so the guests have no idea what they are ordering.  Even the cutlery is on the menu list.  We had five courses, and for each course the guests chose four items.

So the way it works is that the guests choose their four items, one course at a time, and their named menu sheets go back to the kitchen.  The kitchen 'hands' put all the bits and pieces together and take the guests' orders back to them.  We did this in rounds all at the same time so that everyone was always on the same course.  The guests may end up ordering dessert, a knife, beans and an olive for their first course.  They have to eat whatever they've ordered with whatever implements they have before the next course is ordered.  A clever guest might order all their cutlery first which they get to keep all the way through the meal.  I did wash some things and return them throughout the evening.

Over the years we've tweaked the original menu to suit ourselves.  For example, Miss Mischief preferred beans to peas, and wanted golden syrup dumplings instead of individual pavlova nests for dessert.  And we were able to accommodate her.

It was a long evening for Miss Sunshine and I.  I was in the kitchen at 6am preparing as much of the meal as I could before work.  After school I went straight back into the kitchen to get things on the go and ready for quick reheating.  Miss Sunshine did a lot of the going backwards and forwards to collect the next course of orders and deliver the requisite items.  Do not be misled - this is a time consuming meal.  We managed to do it in three hours.  Any less would be impossible, I suspect.Miss Mischief also sprinkled the evening with rebus puzzles, having separated the girls into two teams.

Following are hopefully links that will take you to PDF documents for the menu and the key to all the items, plus some extras to choose from:
Mystery Dinner Menu
Mystery Dinner Code!

This a great, novel way to have a dinner party.